Social Nation: How to Harness the Power of Social Media to Attract Customers, Motivate Employees, and Grow Your Business

It's time to join Social Nation and prosper! This book will
show you, as an employee, customer or partner, how to use new
social technologies, make yourself heard, and produce better
products and services. As a leader and manager, you'll find out how
to use these tools to harness social interactions to improve your
business and to create your own social nation. The book provides a
social assessment for leaders, managers and employees to
scientifically evaluate your individual social skills and
competencies. This book relies on well-known case studies about
businesses that illustrate how social principles and strategies can
help organizations to:

Integrate social skills into existing managerial and leadership
practices

Overcome some of the common risks and objections that are often
cited as obstacles to becoming a successful social enterprise

Adopt new forms of social leadership across the entire
organization

Attain social intelligence by listening, understanding, and
measuring outcomes of your investment in relationships with
customers, employees and partners

Realize tangible economic benefits and ROI from new product and
service offerings Social Nation provides readers with an
opportunity to join the Social Nation community and share
experiences with other leaders and social individuals.

Connecting customers, employees, and loyal partners is what
creates real value. Ultimately, we just all want to belong. The
Seven Principles of Social Success. Work and life become one.
Business is now personal, and engagement is what matters.

2 Why Social Skills Matter 25

A new way of thinking about your strengths. Developing social
and emotional skills. Progress away from Industrial Age and
Information Age capabilities. Ford masters physical skills. Other
companies rely on social and emotional capabilities, like TopCoder.
Becoming extraordinary requires a new way of thinking about what it
takes to do so.

3 Test Your Social Skills 43

How social are you? Discover your ability to make friends, fans,
and followers in business. Take a scientifically designed online
assessment. Learn which three of the most common eight social
traits you possess. Make them work for you and your organization to
create personal and business value.

PART 2 Seven Principles for Building Your Social Nation
63

4 Principle 1: Develop Your Social Skills 65

How Wine Library TV’s Gary Vaynerchuk engages his
audience. How Avon’s Andrea Jung relies on people talking to
people. Social leaders know how to follow. Acknowledge the skills
you lack. Cultivate new social professionals in your
organization.

5 Principle 2: Let Culture Lead the Way 85

Zappos does culture like nobody does culture. Solidify your core
values by modeling them after your personal values. Let your
employees define culture. Find out what everyone else wants. Google
gets it, so people flock to Google. Define your space in a social
way.

6 Principle 3: Mind Your Online and Offline Manners 107

It started with Emily Post. Now, Peter Post takes his
great-grandmother’s timeless social etiquette online. Manners
matter in the online world. It’s not about you. Don’t
hide bad behavior behind social media. It’s the message that
matters, not the medium.

Ganz Toys goes social with Webkinz. Furry critters link the
online and offline worlds while producing valuable information.
Business can collect data and know more than ever about what really
matters to us, which means better-than-ever products and services.
Understand your communities’ sentiment and act on them.

Soda becomes social. PepsiCo turns Mountain Dew over to loyal
drinkers for innovative ideas. The crowd drives the product’s
evolution. Open innovation enhances creativity, progress, and speed
to market. You can have the best R&D team but you still need
input from others.

10 Principle 7: Reward Others and You Will Be Rewarded, Too
171

Anyone can develop applications for Apple. You get what you want
and you get paid to do it. Financial rewards are only part of the
equation. Emotional rewards are more in demand now than ever
before. Business has to appeal to both our wallets and hearts.

PART 3 Start Today to Create Your Own Social Nation
183

11 How to Get Started and 10 Pitfalls to Avoid 185

Know the difference between friends and followers and fans and
fanatics. Five places to get started. You don’t need to
perfect your social skills or strategies to get started. Start
small. See obstacles as opportunities. Taking the plunge takes
courage but pays off. Avoid the top 10 errors of going social.

EPILOGUE: Business and Social Become One 211

Creating a great family is like building a successful business.
Set simple, clear principles. Offer guidelines; don’t make
demands. Let others interpret the guidelines to create greatness.
Don’t waste any more time. Join the Social Nation and
benefit.

BARRY LIBERT is the founder and CEO of Mzinga, a company that provides social software that manages two billion conversations a month for 15,000 communities on behalf of 300 well-known companies. He has coauthored four popular business books on information and social networks.

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